Andrew Breitbart and the Biting Obit

American ideological journalism — if that’s what it is — has a long tradition of savaging warm corpses. I hope no one shocked at tasteless tweets about Andrew Breitbart’s death at 43 is forgetting that left and right both have their specialists in denigrating the dead. Breitbart himself was an amateur, taking easy shots at Ted Kennedy. Christopher Hitchens put a little more effort into his hatchet-wielding, though it hardly takes courage or wit to lambaste Jerry Falwell, living or dead. William F. Buckley and National Review made a habit of vituperative obituaries: nearly 20 years have passed, and Buckley himself is gone, yet friends of the late Murray Rothbard have not forgiven WFB for comparing the much-loved libertarian to David Koresh.

The chief reason not to speak ill of the dead is to spare the feelings of the living. Beyond that, outraging postmortem piety is cheap provocation, attention-whoring of the most puerile kind. But a public figure remains a public figure in death, and a critical examination of his legacy — if not a mean-spirited one — is never needed more than in the midst of ideologically prettifying encomia. I can’t say much about Breitbart myself, since I know him mostly as someone who was famous for being famous. He seemed a lot like Glenn Beck without the television or radio show, a “brand” for projects that have helped to lobotomize the right. It’s a shame that he’s dead, especially at such a young age, but I wish he’d done something else with his life.

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2 Responses to Andrew Breitbart and the Biting Obit

Roger Kimball does this sort of thing very well, writing in complete sentences and paragraphs, rather than impudent little tweets, but there’s still something petty about his attack obits. It doesn’t take Roger Kimball to put Susan Sontag or Norman Mailer in their place 40 years after their heyday. The passing of time has already done that.

The best reason for avoiding attack obits isn’t respect for the dead or concern for the feelings of the living. It’s concern for one’s own reputation: if one is the kind of person who uses every death of an opponent as an excuse to kick the corpse, one reveals oneself to be petty and vindictive. Or maybe it’s respect for death itself — the beyond, the thing that makes our own likes and dislikes and judgments look petty by comparison.

When Mr. Kimball ostentatiously kicked Arthur Miller’s warm corpse in the pages of The New Criterion, it became necessary to inform him, through common decency, of an incident about which he had presumably never known before. The tale is told in an English translation of the Historical and Critical Dictionary by Pierre Bayle (1647-1706):

“Charles V [after his military victory against Germany’s Protestant nobles in 1547] would not suffer Luther’s tomb to be demolished, and forbade the attempting of anything of that nature upon pain of death; the Spaniards earnestly solicited him to pull it down, and even desired that his bones should be dug up and burnt; but the emperor … answered, ‘I have nothing further against Luther, he has henceforth another judge whose jurisdiction it is not lawful for me to usurp: know that I make war not upon the dead, but upon the living who still make war against me’.”

But what would Charles V know about Catholic ethics towards the dead, compared with a polymath like Mr. Kimball?